Associate Professor and Welch LLP Fellow in Accounting at the Telfer School of Management, Merridee Bujaki received a $27,886 Research Development Initiatives grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for her research program on the Rideau Waterway.

While there is considerable research on the history and geography of the Rideau Waterway generally, no formalized analysis of the management, accounting, reporting, governance, and accountability practices has been undertaken. The research program entitled The Rideau Waterway: Management, Accounting, Governance and Accountability, provides an opportunity to begin a detailed study of the evolution of management practices over the life of this historic site, from 1828 to 2007.

Martine Spence, Associate Professor of the Telfer School of Management, was awarded a $60,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for her project entitled Développement durable et performance des PME: Des modèles pour le Canada.

This research seeks to understand the engagement of small and medium enterprises (SME) within countries at different levels of economic development (Canada, Romania, Tunisia) with respect to sustainable development (SD). Research on SME and SD is an emerging field where many of the motivations and barriers affecting the engagement of these firms are unknown.  Different policies in each country with respect to SD, possibly resulting in different behaviours by SME, allow for both a North-South and a South-North exchange of knowledge for government decision-makers, business leaders and researchers. This will be particularly important for Canada in allowing it to better position itself among the model nations for SD and to assert its expertise abroad in this area.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) awarded $88,919 to Associate Professor Mark Freel’s research project entitled Complexity, Novelty and Innovation Networking in Small Firms.

Over the last twenty years, network based models of innovation-led economic development have grown increasingly popular to both the policy and the academy. In most OECD countries, public authorities tend to favor policies that encourage inter-firm cooperation, rather than provide direct financial assistance to individual firms. By elaborating the relationship between networking and innovation, the objectives of the research are to provide guidance to Canadian policymakers and small firms, and to contribute to ongoing debates and discussions further afield.

Large Scale Markov Decision Processes in Healthcare Management is the title of Assistant Professor Jonathan Patrick’s research project that was awarded $90,000 by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

The purpose of this research is to develop a mathematical framework for solving large scale stochastic decision problems and capacity planning within the healthcare management. Such decisions include the scheduling of patients to a resource and the decisions around hospital congestion and ward capacity. A shortage of resources in Canadian hospitals is a chronic and steadily worsening challenge making the efficient use of available resources increasingly critical. The overall contributions are in the practical application to healthcare management as well as the discovery of fundamental insights into the nature of decision policies and capacity planning and the improvement of approximate dynamic programming (ADP).